HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: liberty


Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: children


To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of the ablest generals.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: war


Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: virtue


We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is one of our own actions--struggles which are, as it were, the reverse side of humanity. This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side to men.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: humanity


A long future requires a long past.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: future


Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Romans et contes philosophiques

Tags: gambling


It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides


Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an imbecile.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conversation


What an admirable maneuver it would be to make a wife dance, and to feed her on vegetables!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: dance


Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: women


Love consists almost always in conversation. There are few things inexhaustible in a lover: goodness, gracefulness and delicacy. To feel everything, to divine everything, to anticipate everything; to reproach without bringing affliction upon a tender heart; to make a present without pride; to double the value of a certain action by the way in which it is done; to flatter rather by actions than by words; to make oneself understood rather than to produce a vivid impression; to touch without striking; to make a look and the sound of the voice produce the effect of a caress; never to produce embarrassment; to amuse without offending good taste; always to touch the heart; to speak to the soul—this is all that women ask. They will abandon all the delights of all the nights of Messalina, if only they may live with a being who will yield them those caresses of the soul, for which they are so eager, and which cost nothing to men if only they have a little consideration.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: action


Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: failure


Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

HONORé DE BALZAC

attributed, And I Quote

Tags: marriage


Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: Men


My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Lily of the Valley

Tags: women


The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life